Blurry application fonts

[zipmmcs]

Hello,

 

I faced wiht a symptom with the Paint.NET 4 on Windows 7 x86/x64 Home Premium and Enterprise. The VGA card (if matters) is an ATi 7770, but tested on i3's internal GPU and on HD 6750 as well. All the application fonts (including menus and title bar) shows the fonts blurry - please see attached picture.

I tried different ClearType settings including turning it off completely without any progress.

With the previous version (3.5.10/11) I did not observe this issue. If there is a workaround or solution already, please share with me.

 

Thanks & Regards,

zipmmcs

[BoltBait]

I don't see an attached picture.

Please host it at photobucket (or some other hosting site) and post the link here.

[zipmmcs]

Dear BoltBait,

 

it is uploaded to here: http://i1285.photobucket.com/albums/a597/zipmmcs/PNET_401_zpsca818dd9.png

 

Thanks,

zipmmcs

[Pixey]

Hi @zipmmcs - you need to have a new layer before you can see those options:

With no layer: http://i.imgur.com/M7b6lVU.png

With a layer: http://i.imgur.com/0YEHa2M.png

Edited July 13, 2014 by Pixey

[zipmmcs]

Hi Pixey,

 

first of all thank you for answering my issue. But you misunderstand the situation. This is and interface issue.

OK. I reuploaded the picture with some markings - I was hoping that the screenshot itself will be talkative enough. Link: http://i1285.photobucket.com/albums/a597/zipmmcs/PNET_401_zpsedcc678a.png

- Adjustments menu: the letter "n" is barely visible.

- Effects menu: the subpixel rendering kills the clear visibility.

- Layers menu\Import From File...: also issue of subpixel rendering - the "I" is not black, but somewhat brown.

- Layers menu\Flip Horizontal: letter "n" is also badly visible.

 

With the same setup the Paint.NET 3.5.11 was just perfect. I cannot recall if different font was used for the interface of the software. For me it is obvoius that the interface font has issues and cannot be rendered perfectly - or an extra clear type rendering applied to the interface of the software.

The situation is even worse when a poor DPI monitor is used like a 5:4 aspect ratop 19"@1280x1024 or a 16:9 24"@1920x1080, it is just bad. I'm sure that this is not a uniqe or user dependent issue since on different setups under different user accounts I can see the problem.

 

Is it possible to change the interface font somehow, like from command parameters?

 

Thanks and Regards,

zipmmcs

[Pixey]

Ahhhh - yes I thought you meant the 'functions' were not highlited.

 

So, it could be an artifacts problem .... see here perhaps this will help.  Hope so anyway

[zipmmcs]

Unfortunately disabling the HW acceleration and running the pdnrepair.exe does not help... But thanks for the tip.

 

Regards,

zipmmcs

[Guest]

I have the same problem.

 

-win7 x64

-AMD Radeon 14.6 drivers

-hardware acc on/off

-no problems with 3.5

-default system font changed from Segoe to Arial

 

[BoltBait]

Or, if you want to keep ClearType, have you "tuned" it?

[Rick Brewster]

Also, if you change the settings for font smoothing, antialiasing, or the ClearType settings, you'll need to restart paint.net. For performance reasons it only gets that info at startup.

[zipmmcs]

The cleartype tuned for darker - every applications provides better readability. Just reinstalled 3.5.11 to _exactly_ the same setup - including cleartype tuning: http://i1285.photobucket.com/albums/a597/zipmmcs/PNET_3511_zps4fae7d8a.png

No blurry font issue. So there is a difference between the two releases from interface point of view which gone bad.

 

Regards,

zipmmcs

Edited July 13, 2014 by zipmmcs

[Rick Brewster]

quickpost, The font rendering looks really broken, color-wise, in that screen shot ... O_o

 

Paint.NET is using a high-quality DirectWrite rendering mode called "natural symmetric." Old versions used good ol' GDI for rendering. Some people just don't like the way DirectWrite does it. *shrug* Edit: it also looks like it is buggy on some systems, giving text a weird "rainbow" appearance

 

I have something y'all can try if you really don't like the way the fonts look.

 

You can download the ZIP attached to this post, and then double-click the .REG file inside of it. It will force Paint.NET to use another DirectWrite rendering mode that should look the same as "good ol' GDI".

 

Or you can make the modification yourself by opening up Registry Editor and going to HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ SOFTWARE \ paint.net, then add a String key called "UI/DefaultTextRenderingMode" (without quotes) and set its value to "ClearTypeGdiClassic" (without quotes).

 

Here's the contents of the .REG file which is inside the .ZIP:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
 
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Paint.NET]
"UI/DefaultTextRenderingMode"="ClearTypeGdiClassic"

PDN4_GDIClassicText.zip

[Guest]

thank you

 

that really helped, everything fine now 

[Ego Eram Reputo]

@Rick: Is this going to become an option for users, or should we bookmark and recommend your post above?

[Rick Brewster]

Just bookmark it for now. 

[zeromus]

I would like to take this opportunity to say thanks for making paint.net is one of the few new relatively new programs in the universe which doesnt forcibly enable text antialiasing.... anywhere. I don't know whether this was on purpose or not, but I imagine the existence of this registry hack is a sign of taking it seriously.

[zipmmcs]

 

...

 

Dear Rick,

 

thank you very much for the quick and comprehensive answer on the topic. It behaves as expected on all PCs now. My problem is solved now.

 

Thank you and best regards,

zipmmcs

[Rick Brewster]

I would like to take this opportunity to say thanks for making paint.net is one of the few new relatively new programs in the universe which doesnt forcibly enable text antialiasing.... anywhere. I don't know whether this was on purpose or not, but I imagine the existence of this registry hack is a sign of taking it seriously.

 

It seems that most people don't notice / don't care. But for those who do notice/care, it's either something they're super passionate about ("I hate this!") or it just doesn't work for their eyes. So it's good to have an "escape hatch."

 

I don't know if you used some older WPF applications but they had this nasty problem whereby if text was moving (e.g., a scrollable area of text, or any type of animation thingy), the text would be super blurry for a moment once it "settled." That really messed with my eyes trying to focus, and there were some cases where I just couldn't use a certain piece of software because of it. Or I had to train myself to look away and then look back. It was a very unpleasant feeling.

[pgaske]

I'd just like to post that I had the same issue on my laptop; Windows 8.1.  The .reg file in this thread fixed my issue.

 

I'm using two external monitors via display port, Paint.NET on primary monitor.  Native screen resolution is 2560 x 1440.  All other applications render fonts correctly, but Paint.NET was really messed up.  It's almost like it was subpixel rendering the fonts with incorrect knowledge of the pixel colour components (ie: RGB vs BGR).

 

Here's a copy of my Diagnostics information:

 

Application paint.net 4.0.1 (Final 4.1.5306.43142)

Build Date Saturday, 12 July 2014

 

Hardware accelerated rendering (GPU) True

Animations True

DPI 96.00 (1.00x scale)

Language en-US

 

OS Windows 8.1 (6.3.9600.0)

.NET Runtime 4.0.30319.34014

Physical Memory 16,323 MB

 

CPU Intel® Core i7-4900MQ CPU @ 2.80GHz

    Architecture x64 (64-bit)

    Process Mode 64-bit

    Speed ~2794 MHz

    Cores / Threads 8

    Features DEP, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4_1, SSE4_2, XSAVE

 

Video Card NVIDIA Quadro K2100M

    Dedicated Video RAM 1,958 MB

    Dedicated System RAM 0 MB

    Shared System RAM 8,161 MB

    Vendor ID 0x10DE

    Device ID 0x11FC

    Subsystem ID 0x05CC1028

    Revision 161

    LUID 0x00008839

    Flags None

    Outputs 2

 

Video Card Microsoft Basic Render Driver

    Dedicated Video RAM 0 MB

    Dedicated System RAM 0 MB

    Shared System RAM 256 MB

    Vendor ID 0x1414

    Device ID 0x008C

    Subsystem ID 0x00000000

    Revision 0

    LUID 0x00009309

    Flags Software

    Outputs 0

[Elbart]

Have there been changes in 4.0.1 compared to 4.0 regarding the rendering of fonts?

 

Left 4.0, right 4.0.1

 

Disabling hardware-acceleration doesn't help.

Win7 SP1, .NET Runtime 4.0.30319.18444, nVidia GT 640, 337.88

Edited July 15, 2014 by Elbart

[Rick Brewster]

There wasn't supposed to be but I'm seeing several people reporting this. I'm trying to figure out what change could've possibly caused this.

 

Are you using a rotated monitor by any chance?

[Rick Brewster]

Okay I think I figured this out. I accidentally swapped the ClearTypeLevel and EnhancedContrast values in 1 location, due to inconsistent ordering between 2 different representations of the text rendering parameters.

 

I'm planning a 4.0.2 update for today or tomorrow, so please just bear with the font rendering for a little while longer.

[BoltBait]

Have there been changes in 4.0.1 compared to 4.0 regarding the rendering of fonts?

 

Left 4.0, right 4.0.1

 

Disabling hardware-acceleration doesn't help.

Win7 SP1, .NET Runtime 4.0.30319.18444, nVidia GT 640, 337.88

I've been running 4.0 for plugin development and hadn't updated to 4.0.1. So, I didn't see the same issue that you all have seen in this thread. Had I upgraded, I would have been "up in arms" as well. I just upgraded and must say that Version 4.0.1 hurts my eyes.

[Rick Brewster]

Install 4.0.2 and it'll fix this.

[Elbart]

Fixed, thank you.